OIL & GAS

AUSTIN, Texas -- SciComp Inc., a leading provider of automated software synthesis technology for financial markets, and Powerllel Corporation, a leading provider of parallel and distributed computing solutions, announced today that they will form a strategic alliance to develop and distribute a parallel-processing version of the SciFinance(R) suite of products. This integration extends SciComp's paradigm -- generating custom derivative pricing codes without programming -- to the generation of parallel and distributed codes. With no additional development work, customers can reap the performance benefits afforded by running their pricing models in parallel on a cluster, grid, or distributed resource-managed environment. The first joint product release, scheduled for Q4 2003, will be a Powerllel-enabled version of SciMC(TM). SciMC is SciComp's derivative pricing software that uses the Monte Carlo method and supports a range of financial instruments including the pricing of American-style options using the Longstaff-Schwartz approach. "In today's cost-conscious world, organizations are looking for technology solutions that effectively address their needs, reduce associated business costs, development costs and risks, and are inexpensive to maintain," said Eliot Listman, CEO of Powerllel. "The integration of Powerllel's software with the SciFinance suite of products provides clients with solutions that meet these goals." Powerllel's software significantly reduces the development time, costs, and risks associated with adapting applications, systems, and models to run in a distributed and parallel computing environment. Powerllel's software can address both simple and complex parallel computing problems, and it supports both "coarse grain" and "fine grain" parallelism. The performance benefits of Powerllel's software may be realized with a local cluster of machines, with blades, or as part of a larger grid solution. "Being able to automatically create distributed and parallel simulation codes makes Monte Carlo an even more effective method," says Elaine Kant, CEO of SciComp. "We are pleased to be working with Powerllel to give our clients access to faster Monte Carlo implementations that make it practical to price a wider variety of structured products, especially for demanding and rapidly growing areas such as credit derivatives. This enables our customers to model complex transactions and quickly generate risk measures that are critical for decision making."